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State officials back activists in lowering teen birth rates

By Michael Norton, State House News Service

Updated:
01/30/2013 07:39:27 AM EST

BOSTON -- Senate President Therese Murray, Public Health Commissioner Lauren Smith and state Medicaid chief Julian Harris joined activists Tuesday as they called for $1.5 million in additional state spending to address unmet needs and help keep the state's teen birth rate down.

According to the Massachusetts Family Planning Association, the state in fiscal 2012 provided funding for 58 percent of people deemed eligible for services, with costs to serve the remaining 42 percent paid for with federal funding or absorbed by family planning agencies. In arguing for the funding, the association touted unintended pregnancies, births and abortions averted as the result of services provided at 89 family planning sites.

Smith said the teen birth rate in Massachusetts hit a new low in 2010, the last year for which data is available, and is half the national average.

"That decreased birth rate is not because teenagers in Massachusetts are less sexually active," Smith said, attributing it instead to "more and better and complete access" to comprehensive sexual education and reproductive health services.

Smith, who like Harris talked up Gov. Deval Patrick's call for higher taxes to pay for services, called it "tremendous" that the number of births last year to mothers between 15 and 19 years old was down to 3,900.

Noting 40 births last year to mothers between 10 and 14, Smith said she is the mother of twin 12-year-olds.

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"I can assure you I would much rather know that they are safe than to have someone come tell me that they were pregnant," she said. "We clearly have to do a better job around that."

Smith also has a 15-year-old son.

"You better believe I am talking to him just the way I am talking to my girls because unless you guys have forgotten, the boys are involved, too," Smith said. "Girls don't become pregnant on their own, although you would think from some of the public discourse that's how it happens."

Describing the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade this month, Murray, D-Plymouth, called family planning services one of her top priorities, recalling the passage of laws ensuring timely access to emergency contraception and a law creating a buffer zone to enable patients to safely visit family planning clinics.

In remarks delivered in Nurses Hall, Murray said family health services and teen-pregnancy prevention funding has been maintained since fiscal 2011, but added, "We really have to do a better job because some of those numbers are rising, particularly in the immigrant population. We really need to get in there and do some work."

Harris, who oversees a program that provides health insurance for 1.3 million residents, told activists that tax increases included in Gov. Deval Patrick's budget are important to health-care services. Patrick's schedule of tax hikes, which would net $1.9 billion in new government revenues, are under review in the Legislature.

MassHealth plans to cover 200,000 additional people in 2014 under the federal Affordable Care Act, according to Harris, a primary-care physician who said he used to work in the reproductive-health field and called family-planning clinics "our partners on the front lines."

The ACA offers states the opportunity to expand the range of services offered, Harris said, and features a family planning state plan amendment option that would allow the state to seek federal approval to provide limited family planning services to men and women with incomes up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level.

To applause from activists, Harris said his staff was "closely examining" that option.

According to the association, 83 percent of its clients earn less than 150 percent of the federal poverty level and 39 percent speak a language other than English as their primary language.

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